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One-Sheet, Contact/Release Info, Streaming Player, mp3 and Press Photos:




matt bauer
click for streaming audio
(160kbps)

Tracklist:


Sheltering Dark
Barn Owl
Don't Let Me Out mp3
Rose And Vine
As She Came Out Of The Water
Blacksnake In The Carport
(He Asks The Figure) Are You The One
Old Clothes
We Drove To Highbridge (Glass Insulators)
The Silver Cloud
The Island Moved In The Storm
Florida Rain
Foxgloves
Old Kimball
You Were Saying Goodbye
Corolla (The One You Love)


catalogue: LSE 009
upc :
859700761427
wholesale:$8.25
store:$7.43
sugg, list:$11.98
release date:Sept. 2nd, 2008

download one-sheet (PDF)


artist:
site
myspace
email


Press:
daniel@forcefieldpr.com
force field pr

US distribution:
southern
radio:
apples and cats

 


Matt Bauer
The Island Moved In The Storm
LSE 009





In 1968 a young woman was found dead along a dirt road near Eagle Creek, north of Georgetown, Kentucky. For thirty years, she was known only as ‘Tent Girl’, the name given to her by the Kentucky Post & Times Star because she'd been found wrapped in canvas resembling a tent bag. This album is a series of overlapping narratives inspired by her story as re-imagined to incorporate imagery and locales from Matt Bauer’s rural Kentucky upbringing. These songs explore what it means to be home and to be lost, what it means to pass from life to death.

The Island Moved in the Storm takes its name from a stretch of gravel and shale in a bend of Triplett Creek where Bauer grew up. After a hard rain, the island would "move" and change shape, adapting to the new flow of water. The album reflects this vision of impermanence and fleeting beauty not only in the songs that take the island as their setting, but also in songs that expand into the wider world: The woods have “scatters of deer tracks frozen in the mud” and wild horses are glimpsed for a moment before they scatter into the trees along a shoreline. Human hair is spread around a garden to keep out rabbits only to be woven into bird nests and carried away on the wind. Girls jump from a river bridge and “their hair floats up to heaven.”

But the world of this collection of songs is one of powerful indifference as much as passing beauty. A blacksnake crawls headless through grass and dandelions, perhaps the same white dandelions that later find a breeze “blowing off their heads”. A soldier lies wounded on a battlefield, imagining a mysterious figure with a string of bluegill, still gasping for air, hanging from her dress. As her mascara runs “like downed telephone wires” he asks her “are you the one / who has come to sew me up / and send me back out?” A boy likens the meeting of his parents to a spider trapping a fly, an image that insinuates an unbalanced relationship, but also, as is often the case in The Island Moved in the Storm, a sense of inevitability and natural order that is beyond judgement.

The musical arrangements retain the economy and space of Bauer’s previous recordings while expanding the palette of sounds and instrumentation. A range of musician friends from Bauer's current Brooklyn base, and from the San Francisco Bay Area, contribute to the recording. These include Angel Deradoorian (Dirty Projectors), Alela Diane, Mariee Sioux, Greg McMullen (Chris Whitley), Elizabeth Dotson-Westphalen (St. Vincent), Nathan Wanta (Last of the Blacksmiths), Angela Webster (Rhett Miller), and longtime collaborator Frank Floyd.

Recorded in closets, living rooms, kitchens, attics, bathrooms and studios from San Francisco’s Mission District to Greenpoint, Brooklyn to Fayette County, Kentucky, The Island Moved in the Storm is none of those places and all of them at once: It is a moment of beauty, stolen from a fleeting world.







Players:
Matt Bauer, Madelyn Burgess, Angel Deradoorian, Alela Diane, Elizabeth Dotson-Westphalen, Eric Elterman, Frank Floyd, Jay Foote, Greg Gheorghiu, Chad King, Sarah Kramer, Greg McMullen, Karl Meyer, Alisa Rose, Mariee Sioux, Nathan Wanta, Angela Webster




Further Reading:
Tent Girl



Previous Selected Press:

"Understated, bare boned, intimate, the sound is pared back with guitar and banjo providing skeletal support for a set of songs portraying nature red in tooth and claw... a tremendous record." - Americana U.K.

"Listen closely and you'll hear in Bauer's heart-breaking tales of modern life, of condoms and coke cans left by cemetery fences, and of wildfires burning in the west. Influenced by country and bluegrass, Bauer is reinterpreting those traditions to create a haunting modern sound.  -San Francisco Bay Guardian

"Once in a long while, I hear a piece of music, a song or even a whole album, that seems not merely valuable to me but also important. Where there was no apparent exit, it casually opens a door to where music might go next and whispers, "This way.'"  - Pure Music

"'Carve It Out' unfolds like a mourner`s haiku...his hushed, intimate delivery bridges the past with the immediate...lyrical imagery, both poetic and raw."  -Miles Of Music 
 
"He's channeling something heavy, preparing the rest of us for a darkness or beauty that we aren't yet ready to receive. We believe Matt Bauer is a prophet."  - Thrasher Magazine

"This disc examines the intermeshed realities of our world, its natural workings of beauty and cruelty, most painfully examined in a creepy reworking of lullaby "All the Pretty Horses." - Skyscraper




Press Photos:



Matt Bauer

The Island Moved In The Storm
high res.
web res.






Matt Bauer
high res.
web res.







Matt Bauer
photo:Mikael Kennedy
high res.
web res.






Matt Bauer
photo:Mikael Kennedy
high res.
web res.






     








   

Discography:
Title
Format
Catalogue #/ Label
Date
CD
LSE 009 La Société Expéditionnaire
2008
Wasps and White Roses
CDEP
CBR003 Crossbill Records
2006
Nandina
CD
Self-Released
2004